In nearly every technical trade from auto mechanics to refrigerator repair, a series of four letter words are used to express frustration or to project one’s vexation on an inanimate object. Frequently these words, regardless of the shop in which they’re said, bear a striking similarity to each other. For many search engine marketers, one of the strongest four letter words is spam. On the Internet, the word spam is most often associated with unsolicited junk email but search engine marketers use the word to describe techniques that violate search engine guidelines or are in some way or another based on offering search engines spiders one set of data while presenting another on the site. Over the past three weeks, threads about search engine spam at various SEM forums transited from discussion to debate, at many points descending into downright nastiness and incivility. Read more…